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The Enterprise of Opera

The Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milan is one of the world's largest privately owned music collections. It encompasses the estate of the Casa Ricordi music publishing company, which was founded in 1808 and acquired by Bertelsmann in 1994. Today the archives contain 7,800 original scores from more than 600 operas – including valuable original manuscripts by Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini – as well as some 10,000 librettos, close to 6,000 historical photographs and the company's entire business correspondence, which affords far-reaching insight into how the cultural industry of the time thought and worked.